Welcome to FFXIV Raid

*This post is satire, based on Purge’s original ‘Welcome to Dota, You Suck’ guide.

The Task You Are Undertaking

Welcome to Final Fantasy XIV. Moogles are no longer cute, chocobos are simply fantasy cars, and the gritty reality of playing a healer is far removed from the clean, sparkling healing spells they cast.

This isn’t the Final Fantasy of your childhood. This is Final Fantasy Purgatory, a world where you are perpetually running the chocobo race to win Tidus’s ultimate weapon in Final Fantasy X.

You are going to be constantly reminded of how bad you are at the video game for the next 6 months (if you learn). If you read this guide, do research on fights beforehand, and bring food to raid, you can shave some time off that number.

Unfortunately, MMOs have a massive learning curve.

Every raid encounter requires a honed ability to dodge circles on the ground while pressing all of your buttons at once, and hitting the boss in the process. Do you sometimes fall off of cliffs in Super Mario or drive off the road in Mario Kart? Do you lose patience after playing a 45 minute MOBA? Raiding might not be for you.

MMO raids can last upwards of 4 hours, with the very best groups playing for 12 hours straight to maximize their time spent wiping to petty mechanics. What are mechanics? They’re the reason you will spend more time on the ground than actually fighting the boss in the first few hours of your raid encounter.

Prepare to play a lot of FFXIV. If you want to cut this down, read every guide you can get your hands on, and try not to be too surprised when you still fail a mechanic due to packet loss or tethers that should have been fixed before the fight was ever released. You are going to have to learn how to press buttons, what order to press them in, how to use these buttons to not kill your teammates, and how to use these buttons to stay alive. At some point you might also want to use these buttons to kill the boss, but since parsers aren’t officially allowed, no one will be able to call you out for your subpar DPS unless you join a ‘real’ raid group.

How to Survive the ‘Raid Scene’ as a Newbie

You are going to kill the raid. You are going to drop heals, forget to pop a cooldown, or be out-DPSed by your healers, and someone is going to be happy to tell you exactly what you did wrong. Because of this, it’s hard to find a place in top tier raids before you’ve cleared previous raids. Thankfully, Square Enix has several modes of gameplay you can use to get your feet wet.

Duty Finder

Start here. Square has in its infinite wisdom put old raid tiers into the general pool of players. If your mechanics aren’t sound and you have no idea how to play your class, this is the place for you. Advice in the duty finder falls into two camps: bad and laughable. Occasionally good players queue for fights they’ve beaten years ago, but it’s hard to hear them over the sound of your often incompetent team wiping. But don’t worry, this makes it a great place for learning! Worried about your queue time? Waiting for a queue is an excellent time to look up strats to make sure you understand the fight.

Party Finder

Tired of vote abandons and waiting 24 hours for a queue to pop? Feel confident in your skills as a player? It might be time to try Party Finder. A gigantic bulletin board for your server, there’s no better way to meet like-minded people. Always pick parties that are advertised as ‘Trap’ parties as these are ironically your best chance of clearing. Advertising your party is the key to your success. Using phrases like, ‘3 mistakes and I kick’ or ‘Mistakes will not be tolerated’ is essential to attracting serious players with good attitudes who won’t waste your time.

Upselling

If you are joining a party finder, be sure to upsell yourself. You are not a healer with add phase experience in Sephirot EX, you are a healer with ‘final phase’ experience! Know the fight to the very end but you keep hitting that pesky enrage? You are a DPS player with the full fight on ‘farm’. Claim your character is an alt when inquiring members of your party want to know why there’s a newbie bonus in a ‘farm’ party.

What Class Should I Play?

If you enjoy high stress situations, being a Scapegoat for poor gameplay, and have OCD, healer might be the class for you! If a tank dies, ask him to pop more cooldowns and lament your healing partner and those pesky DPS players for standing in spells.

Have a bad connection? Bad at playing the video game? Really good at playing the video game? You might love to DPS! Great players can compare the size of their…parses on FFLogs. Not so great at pulling huge numbers or believe parsers are a sin? No worries. It’s easy to find a group that will let you slide along, numbers unnoticed. If you step in a damage puddle, it’s always the healer’s fault.

You’ve led countless trap parties to victory. You know every mechanic, every tankbuster, and you love talking. If you’re a fearless leader, born to shuffle your unenlightened party members through a complicated fight, and your DPS is middling, Tanking might be for you. Popping cooldowns all at once is the best way to stay alive. And remember, if you die, it was definitely a healer’s fault.

How Do I Get My First Raid?

Network, network, network. Post Party Finders with your name, item level, and a list of accomplishments. This is where you get to brag about having Titan EX ‘on farm’ and clearing A4S after nerfs. No credentials? Get back in PF and get some. Once a group picks you up, you begin the Cycle of Raid Replenishment:

Join a raid

Honeymoon period

Members get kicked or leave / You get kicked and leave

Group Reforms / You find a new group

Repeat

If this seems futile or repetitive, just remember that if you play your cards right, you can trade up with every raid group that shatters. Do this using the ‘upsell’ method mentioned earlier. Let’s say your group was working on the first boss of the raid tier. Maybe lesser raiders would simply say ‘I am working on A5S’, but you’re different! You read this guide, and you have A5S ‘with enrage experience’.

Duty Complete

As you gain raid experience, you’ll learn better tricks, like blaming other people for your wipes, or putting up Party Finders alerting the community of that scummy guy who rolled on your item. The MMO raiding community can be a difficult nut to crack, but with this guide and your shiny new level 60 under your belt, you can be a pinnacle of the raiding community, too!